For years, the world watched as Russia systematically kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, erasing their identities and forcing them into Russian families. This isn’t just a war crime—it’s genocide in real time.
Now, Trump’s regime is actively helping Russia cover up this genocide. His State Department quietly terminated a crucial contract that was facilitating the transfer of evidence on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children to European law enforcement, according to The New Republic.
This decision cripples efforts to track and recover abducted children, making it harder to hold Russia accountable for what international courts have already labeled a war crime. By cutting off this support, Trump’s regime is not just abandoning Ukraine—they are actively obstructing justice.
This isn’t just inaction—it’s complicity in one of the most horrific acts of genocide and war crimes.
Russia’s War Crime: The Mass Kidnapping of Ukrainian Children
Under Putin’s direct orders, at least 20,000 Ukrainian children—though the real number may be much higher—have been stolen from Ukraine and transported to Russia. Many have been ripped from orphanages and hospitals in occupied territories, while others—despite having living relatives—have been abducted and placed in “re-education” camps designed to erase their Ukrainian identity. These children are tortured, subjected to psychological reprogramming, and stripped of their Ukrainian heritage, culture, and language. They are then forcibly granted Russian citizenship and placed with Russian families as part of an illegal state-run program aimed at assimilating them into Russian society and erasing their Ukrainian identity forever.
Russia does not even attempt to hide these hideous crimes. Grigory Karasin, head of the international committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, openly boasted that 700,000 children from illegally occupied territories in Ukraine have been taken to Russia. The sheer scale of this state-sponsored mass abduction is staggering—one of the largest forced deportations of children in modern history. This is not just a war crime— it is clear evidence of Russia’s genocidal intent to erase Ukrainian identity by targeting children, severing them from their families, their culture, and their homeland.
The International Criminal Court recognized this as a war crime as investigations continue. In March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for the “unlawful deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children.” This systematic abduction is not just a violation of international law—it is genocide. Russia is not merely stealing children but destroying Ukraine’s future by erasing an entire generation.
And now, Trump, Musk, and Rubio are actively helping Russia cover up the genocide and war crimes.
Trump’s State Department Blocks Efforts to Track Abducted Ukrainian Children
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. State Department funded a Yale research team that tracked kidnapped Ukrainian children using satellite imagery and open-source intelligence. Their work was crucial in exposing Russia’s state-run program of forced deportation and illegal adoption, providing undeniable evidence of war crimes committed against Ukrainian children.
Now, that work is under threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has canceled the program, cutting off funding and blocking the transfer of key evidence to European law enforcement. Without this support, it will be significantly harder to locate and rescue kidnapped children, hold Russia accountable for genocide and war crimes, and ensure that stolen children are returned to Ukraine.
The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale worked with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Bring Kids Back UA campaign, which has helped track and locate hundreds of abducted children, successfully repatriating approximately 1,240 so far. With funding cut off, these efforts are now at risk.
Genocide and War Crimes: What’s at Stake
Under the Genocide Convention, the forced deportation and assimilation of children meets the legal definition of genocide, as it involves forcibly transferring children from one group to another with the intent to erase their identity, conducting mass deportations under state policy, and destroying cultural, linguistic, and familial ties. The International Criminal Court has already taken action by issuing arrest warrants, but its ability to prosecute and hold Russia accountable depends on cooperation from governments like the United States.
Instead of aiding these efforts, Trump is actively sabotaging them, cutting off crucial funding for investigations and making it harder to track abducted children and bring perpetrators to justice. Even the U.S. Congress, led by Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA-7), recognizing the horror of this crime, overwhelmingly passed a resolution in 2024 condemning Russia’s abduction and forced transfer of Ukrainian children.
Yet, Trump’s regime is doing the opposite—helping obstruct justice while aligning itself with Russia’s war crimes.
Trump’s Loyalty to Moscow
This isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of Trump’s broader fealty to the Kremlin and his regime’s Russia-aligned policies. From cutting off military aid to amplifying Kremlin propaganda, Trump continues to systematically weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend itself while strengthening Russia’s position. Every move he makes advances Russia’s strategic goals, further undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and the West’s ability to hold Russia accountable.
We all saw as JD Vance ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office meant to send a clear message that the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. Trump echoes Kremlin propaganda at every opportunity, falsely branding Zelensky a “dictator” and insisting that Ukraine must hold elections immediately—a demand that directly serves Russia’s interests, as Moscow has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Zelensky and would exploit an election to further destabilize Ukraine.
Trump’s so-called “peace plan” is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to force Ukraine into surrender, as he insists that Kyiv must “negotiate”—a demand that would strip Ukraine of its sovereignty and hand Putin exactly what he wants.
Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department is actively obstructing efforts to hold Russia accountable for war crimes, cutting off support for investigations into the kidnapping and forced deportation of Ukrainian children. At every turn, Trump is working to weaken Ukraine, embolden Russia, and dismantle any accountability for Russia’s crimes—all while seeking to reestablish financial deals with Moscow and prioritizing his personal and political interests.
As part of carrying out Russia’s agenda, Trump is also attacking NATO and attempting to dismantle alliances that have kept America safe, further isolating the U.S. while handing Putin exactly what he wants.
What Can We Do?
We cannot stay silent while the U.S. government helps Russia cover up genocide. And if Trump is willing to excuse war crimes against children, what won’t he justify?
Please call your members of Congress and demand answers. Ask them why the State Department cut funding for tracking abducted Ukrainian children and why the U.S. is turning its back on accountability for Russian war crimes.
Lauren Villagran of USA Today wrote about the inhumane conditions for women in an ICE detention center called Krome. Krome is one of about 130 such centers around the country. It is managed by a for-profit company called Akima Infrastructure Protection, which has a contract for $685 million. Given the horrible living conditions, DOGE and Musk might want to check out waste, fraud, and abuse. We taxpayers are paying a lot for such a tawdry facility.
Villagran writes.
Immigrant women say they were held “like animals” in ICE detention and subjected to conditions so extreme they feared for their lives.
Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held “like sardines in a jar,” as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor. Getting one three-minute shower over three or four days in custody.
“We smelled worse than animals,” one detainee said. “More girls were coming every day. We were screaming, begging them, ‘You can’t let them come.’ They didn’t have space.”
Four women were held in February at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami – a detention center reserved for men. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the women into custody on alleged immigration violations, but none has a criminal background, according to a review of law enforcement records. They shared their experiences with USA TODAY on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation by the government because they are still detained.
The allegations come after two men at Krome died in custody on Jan. 23 and Feb. 20.
USA TODAY provided ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with a detailed list of the allegations on March 11. A day after publication, on March 24, an ICE spokesperson responded with an emailed statement saying the agency can’t substantiate specific allegations without the names of the individuals.
“ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously,” the statement said. “These allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care.”
The government’s own investigators have repeatedly found serious problems in immigration detention centers around the country. The problems have persisted through Democrat and Republican administrations and range from fatal medical neglect to improper use of force.
Last year, a report on unannounced inspections at 17 detention centers from 2020 to 2023 – bridging the Trump and Biden administrations – found that “regardless of time, location, detainee population and facility type, ICE and facility staff have struggled to comply with aspects of detention standards.”
But the women’s allegations at Krome, which was one of the 17 centers reviewed in the report, suggest detention conditions have deteriorated rapidly as the new Trump administration works to deliver on the president’s promises for tougher immigration enforcement.
ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency’s detention capacity of 41,500 beds. Immigration detention is “non-punitive,” according to ICE policy, in recognition that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal.
Mich González, an immigration attorney representing the family of the Ukrainian man who died Feb. 20 in Krome custody, visits the facility regularly to meet with clients. The guards there “are overwhelmed,” he said.
“Guards themselves have made those comments to us: ‘It shouldn’t be like this,'” said González, founding partner of Sanctuary of the South.
The shift from a “flexible” immigration policy to a “very aggressive” one means “the system simply can’t process all of these people,” said Miami-based immigration attorney Nenad Milosevic.
Krome is overwhelmed and understaffed, he said. “I know the conditions are extremely bad, and they’re not supposed to be that way.”
‘He didn’t want to scare me more’
One of the four women wanted to explain what she went through to her fiance. She wrote what she remembered on paper and titled it “Hell on Earth.”
She dialed out on a scratchy phone line and asked him to record her as she read from her notes.
“The officer only say that I am going to spend the night in Miami,” she said, using the English she learned during nearly two decades in the United States. “Now remembering his face, like I knew he knew that I am going to go through hell and he didn’t want to scare me more.”
This account is based on that 15-minute audio recording detailing the alleged mistreatment, as well as numerous telephone and video interviews with the woman and her fiance and with three other detained women, their family members and attorneys, as well as the two attorneys who independently witnessed the deteriorating conditions.
All four women described being chained at the wrist, waist and chest and loaded onto a prison bus, where they were held, in one case, for six hours; in another, for 11 or 12 hours.
“They took us to a bigger bus,” the woman said in the audio recording. “They checked us, and then they put like chains on us, hands to waist, connected. It was very scary because they chained my chest super-tight and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was really scared because I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to breathe.'”
There was no access to a toilet, so guards told the women – whose accounts in some cases occurred on different days or different buses – to urinate or defecate on the floor. They watched, helpless, as some did.
“A man in the back of the bus – we were separated with a door – he was screaming, ‘Somebody wants a bathroom,'” the woman said in the audio. “And somebody peed there. It stank so badly.”
She described her first impression of Krome as “a really chaotic-looking place.” Guards rushed the women through a corridor, past the male dormitories where men pressed their faces to the glass, “wildly staring … like they had never seen women before.”
“We were pushed in a room, filled with women, like sardines in a jar,” she said. “I will never forget those first seconds when I heard the door behind me locked.”
It was entirely predictable that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would create a labor shortage by driving immigrants away. Whether documented or not, immigrants are the backbone of the tourist industry and agriculture, two of the basic elements in the state’s economy. Once they were gone, who would replace them? Children. DeSantis is now promoting a reduction in child labor laws to replace the immigrant labor he criminalized. Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell describes the new Florida economy, balanced on the backs of children. Not the rich kids, but the poor kids.
The Newsweek headline looked like satire: “Florida May Replace Immigrant Workers With Child Labor.”
Savvy Floridians know, though, that you can’t fictionalize stories more absurd than this state’s reality. And Florida lawmakers are, in fact, trying to roll back the state’s child-labor laws.
Basically, if employers in this state can’t exploit immigrants, the governor and Legislature want them to be able to legally exploit your children.
The latest proposal would allow teens to work longer hours, without breaks and even overnight shifts on school nights. Take that, Myanmar.
Up next, maybe we can emulate Burkina Faso where more than half the kids are in the labor force, some as young as 7. Now there’s a country with values.
What you’re witnessing is a real-life version of the dog that chased cars without thinking about what he’d do if he actually caught one. In this case, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s GOP legislators have fumed for years about undocumented workers without having the slightest clue about how they’d respond if those workers actually walked off Florida job sites.
So now they’re panicking and want your kids to fill the bill.
Normally, in a free-market economy, if an employer can’t find workers, it would just raise wages until people start applying. That’s how supply and demand works.
But Florida’s GOP politicians don’t want to ask their campaign donors to raise wages. They’d rather flood the market with another class of exploitable workers — teenagers.
Maybe you used to dream of your teen becoming an engineer or architect. Well, forget that Ivy League, ivory-tower fiddle-faddle. Florida’s economy needs them harvesting tomatoes and cleaning motel rooms.
In some ways, it makes sense to put our kids to work. We’re sure not educating them. Florida’s SAT scores have dropped to 47th in America. And our state’s eighth-graders just posted the lowest math and reading scores in 20 years.
So, if we’re not preparing them for higher education or high-paying jobs, we might as well get them primed for the low-wage tourism and agriculture jobs that make this state hum.
Senate Bill 918, would eliminate restrictions on how many hours 16- and 17-year-olds can work. It would end guaranteed meal breaks and also lift restrictions for kids as young as 14 who are home schooled or enrolled in virtual school. (So if you want your rugrat pulling down a paycheck, just yank ’em out of traditional school.)
The Florida Policy Institute summarized the bill by saying it would allow Florida to work teens “for unlimited hours, any time day or night, seven days per week and without breaks.”Welcome to childhood in Florida.
Not all Republicans think this is a boffo idea. Sen. Joe Gruters, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, joined Democrats in opposing the bill, saying: “I think we need to let kids be kids.”
Gruters chose his words carefully: “Let kids be kids” is a line DeSantis uses a lot, usually when he’s pushing censorship laws.
Apparently, in DeSantis’ worldview, teens aren’t mature enough to see certain drag performers, even alongside their parents — but are mature enough to work right through the night until school starts at 7 am. That’s just kids being kids.
As I’ve said before, I’m a fan of teens having jobs. I had a paper route in middle school and landed my first real job at a drugstore when I was 14 — old enough to legally sell condoms and tampons, but still immature enough to giggle about it. (Basically, if you ever entered a Revco in the 1980s, nervous about making a purchase, I was your worst nightmare.)
But here’s the thing: I believe teens should get jobs when they and their parents want them to get jobs — not because we need to plug labor holes in our low-wage economy.
Keep in mind: DeSantis didn’t promote his roll-back-child-labor-laws ideas at a panel discussion on building teen character. He did it at panel discussion on immigration. After noting that undocumented workers provided “dirt cheap labor,” DeSantis asked: “Why do we say why we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know teenagers used to work at these resorts?”
This is just about swapping one exploitable labor class for another … in a state that already turns a blind eye to companies that break labor laws.
Remember Florida’s “mandatory” E-Verify law? It explicitly said that the state couldn’t even fine companies caught breaking the law until they’re caught three times. And that law-breaking employers must be given 30 days to stop breaking the law before they’re punished. What other laws work like that?
This is a state that gives companies a pass on labor-law violations and now wants to give them a younger workforce. What a dangerous combo. Even moreso when you consider GOP lawmakers also want to let businesses subvert minimum wage laws for some workers “younger than 18 years of age.”
Kids in Florida who say they have financial “hardships” can surrender even more workplace protections. Basically, the poorer you are, the more you can be exploited. So it ain’t gonna be the private, prep-school kids working farm fields and cleaning motel rooms at 3 in the morning.
DeSantis seemed particularly interested in using kids to fill the theme parks’ job needs. But the proposed rollbacks would also allow teens to work longer hours waxing floors, painting houses, stocking shelves, doing landscaping and working in fast food. Kids would still be banned from doing particularly dangerous jobs like mining or tarring roofs higher than six feet.
So teens could be asked to work overnight shifts right up until the start of a school day. That’s just “kids being kids.” But we’d draw the line at putting kids in boiler rooms and phosphate mines. A state has to have standards, after all.
Government Executive reports that the Secretary Of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to lay off 10,000 of the Department’s 80,000 employeees. Entire divisions will be eliminated or merged. But no one knows who will be laid off. Decisions about layoffs are being made by Elon Musk’s DOGE. Since no one knows who will be fired or why, everyone is fearful.
The Health and Human Services Department has told its employees that 10,000 of them will soon receive layoff notices, though it has not offered any details on who will be impacted or when they will learn of their fates.
The uncertainty has dangled over the more than 80,000 HHS employees since Thursday, when the department first announced it was planning to shed around 25% of its workforce and half of those eliminations would come through reductions in force. Leadership at individual components and offices are regularly seeking to update their employees on what is happening, according to seven individuals within HHS, though they have all said they have been fully kept out of the loop and only a small group of political leaders within HHS know the plans.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to lay off 3,500 employees, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2,400, the National Institutes of Health 1,200 and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 300, according to an HHS fact sheet. HHS did not respond to an inquiry into why the notices were delayed or when they would go out.
Several employees were told to expect RIF notices to hit inboxes on Friday. When that did not happen, they were told to expect them Friday evening or over the weekend. As of Monday afternoon, the notices have still not gone out.
“FDA leadership doesn’t know who will be cut,” said an employee briefed on the matter. “They didn’t have any input into these cuts whatsoever.”
Employees at CDC and NIH expressed similar messages were going out from leadership to the workforce.
“It’s unnecessarily cruel,” said one CDC employee of the uncertainty and delays.
A second CDC employee said they spent the entire weekend refreshing their email waiting to see if a RIF notice arrived. The employee was resigned to their fate, but wanted an answer: “Just put me out of my misery,” the staffer said.
Prior to an “all hands” meeting at one NIH office, employees were encouraged to download their complete personnel files, current position description, pay stubs, tax documents, awards information and contact information for human resources and their supervisor in case they lost access upon being laid off.
The department will not allow those who are subject to RIFs to be allowed back onto HHS campuses, according to two employees briefed on the matter. Some staff were told to bring their laptops homes each day in case they were laid off and not allowed back into their offices. Unlike other agencies that have gone through RIFs, which have immediately placed impacted staff on administrative leave, at least some HHS employees will be expected to work until their date of separation.
At FDA, conversations with office directors were taking place to identify U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps members who could escort laid off employees to their desks to collect their laptops and personal belongings. The uniformed personnel would be available for the RIF-affected staff who need to retrieve items on campus.
The RIFs are expected to take effect May 27, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents much of the HHS workforce. That date could get pushed back given the delay in sending out official RIF letters, however, as agencies typically provide 60 days notice before separations take effect.
Directors at the highest level of the component agencies have communicated “have no knowledge over what is happening,” one employee said in a sentiment echoed by those throughout the department.
A senior HHS official said even HR at component agencies have received no information on who is being laid off or when the notices were going out, though the latest expectation was the letters would be delivered Monday.
“Radio silence,” the official said. “It is madness!”
Government Executive previously reported that top officials were being left out of the workforce reduction process. At NIH, for example, liaisons from the Department of Government Efficiency dictated staffing targets without input from the agency or anyone else at HHS.
Some informal notices were beginning to trickle out Monday afternoon. CDC is planning to eliminate its entire Freedom of Information Act office, according to an impacted employee, which could create legal questions as agencies are required to maintain those functions. The official notices had not yet gone out as of Monday afternoon but all of the office’s 40 employees are expected to receive them.
The reductions will be part of a comprehensive reorganization of HHS. The cuts will save $2 billion annually, department Secretary Robert Kennedy said last week, and HHS will go from 28 divisions throughout the department down to 15. Department-wide functions such as human resources, IT, procurement, external affairs and policy will be centralized into the Administration for Healthy America and regional offices will be slashed in half to just five.
The new AHA will fold into its structure the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. HHS will divide up the functions of the Administration for Community Living, which provides oversight of those serving older and disabled Americans, into CMS, the Administration for Children and Families and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. ASPE itself will be combined with the Agency for Health Research and Quality into the Office of Strategy.
This hurried reorganization is being imposed by the young engineers and computer geeks who work for Musk, apparently without consulting anyone who has done the work. The changes are rushed, haphazard, and carried out without the participation of those with knowledge and experience.
Please open the link to continue reading the article.
The Texas House of Representatives is moving to a vote on vouchers. Governor Greg Abbott has been pushing vouchers for years, but the House legislators have defeated them again and again, even though Republicans have a super-majority in both houses. The votes were provided by a combination of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. The rural Republicans decided that protecting their local public school was more important than pleasing Governor Abbott.
But then a billionaire in Pennsylvania gave Governor Abbott $6 million so he could defeat the recalcitrant Republicans who blocked vouchers.
Abbott managed to knock off several of the Republicans he targeted by lying about their records. In theory, he has the votes to pass voucher legislation.
But will he? There are still rural Republicans who know that vouchers will destroy their hometown school. How will they vote?
Worse, vouchers have failed wherever they have been tried.
Eight Things to Know: State’s Proposed Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for Private Schools
Governor Abbott’s ongoing promotion of universal school choice through taxpayer funded Education Savings Account’s (ESA) focuses on helping low-income, low-performing, and SPED students obtain a better education. However, this material highlights eight things to know that contradict the state’s promotion of taxpayer funded ESAs for private schools.
1.) Taxpayer Cost: The fiscal note for ESAs is $4.6 billion per year in year 2030. In lieu of funding ESAs for private schools, the state could:
Further reduce property taxes, Stop funding public schools below the national average (Texas students are not “Below Average”), Provide each Texas public-school graduate with $12,100 to obtain college or technical degrees, or Fund public highways versus toll roads.
2.) ESAs Primarily Benefit Students/Families Currently Attending Private Schools: Despite the promotion of providing opportunities for low-income students in public schools, the state estimates that 88% of existing private school students, 9% of home school students, and only 1.8% of current public-school students will receive ESAs (see table below). Source: SB 2 Fiscal Note
2.) Arizona and Universal School Choice: With Arizona being the first state to provide universal school choice, Governor Abbott invited former Governor Ducey to promote the importance of universal school choice at a recent press conference. But no one mentioned that the 2024 NAEP scores of Arizona are among the lowest in the nation and significantly below the NAEP scores of Texas, especially for English Language Learners and Economically Disadvantaged students that ESAs are supposed to benefit. Source: The Nation’s Report Card.
5.) State Currently Funds School Choice With Separate System of Charters and Unproven Results: Over the last 30-years, the State has directed taxpayer funding to provide school choice in local communities through a separate system of privately managed charter schools. Currently, charters: Operate 905 schools, Enroll over 420,000 students, Annually receive taxpayer funding of $4.6 billion, Serve students with lower teacher experience, fewer certified teachers, higher student to teacher ratios, administrative costs, and attrition rates compared to locally governed public schools, and Underperform locally governed school districts (see “2024 STAAR” below). Source: Texas Education Agency and Txreasearchportal.com.
6.) Admission Policies Mitigate Low-Income, Low-Performing and SPED Student Enrollment: Private school admission requirements directly limit of the enrollment of current low-income, low-performing, and SPED public school students. Based upon various Texas private school Student/Parent Handbooks, private schools restrict admissions based upon academic performance, religious persuasion, special needs/learning differences, and/or cost. Academic Performance: Private schools often require students to be “at grade level,” thereby prohibiting the enrollment of low-performing students. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
“The student must test at grade level (50 percentile) or above in mathematics and reading on a nationally recognized standardized test…No accommodations are provided for entrance testing.”
“Once students are placed on academic probation (for not achieving a GPA of at least 2.0), they will be given one semester to improve their academic performance to a level of 70%. If not achieved, the student may be required to withdraw from the school
Religious Persuasion: Religious educational institutions are exempt from Civil Rights legislation relating to the enrollment and acceptance of individuals with a particular religious persuasion. For example, a new non-Catholic student is the last enrollment priority at many Catholic schools. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
Enrollment Priority – Children of: 1.) Faculty, 2.) Active parishioners with siblings in school, 3.) Active parishioners without siblings in school, 4.) Non-Active parishioners with siblings in school, 5.) Non-active parishioners without siblings in school, 6.) Catholics that are parishioners of other Catholic communities, 7.) Non-Catholics with siblings in school, and 8.) Non-Catholics.
Further enrollment limitations for non—Catholic students may also be higher tuition relative to Catholic students.
2024/25 Tuition: Catholic – $8,160 and Non-Catholic – $10,408
Special Needs/Learning Differences: While there are certainly private schools that focus on serving students with special needs/learning differences, private schools are not required to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and may choose to discriminate against students with disabilities. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
“The school does not admit students with more severe learning differences or those requiring extensive special education services… (To be admitted), the family must provide current diagnostic testing that recognizes the student’s performance on recognized aptitude testing is 90 or higher.”
“Private schools are not required to significantly alter their programs, lower, or modify their standards to accommodate a child with special needs.”
ESA Does Not Cover the Cost of Private Schools: SB 2 provides a $10,000 ESA for students to attend a private school. For low-income students, the amount is insufficient to cover the $14,750 estimated average annual private school cost, which is $11,350 for tuition and $3,400 for fees (application, testing, enrollment, computer, sports, club fees, transportation, mandatory parent service hours, and uniforms).
7.) Choice Forces Public-School Closures that Denys the “School Choice” of Public-School Families: It has become common for urban, suburban, and rural school districts to close high-performing campuses due to declining enrollment due to the state’s expansion of charters. In fact, school districts have recently closed over 125 campuses due to the expansion of state-approved charters. As such, providing school choice for certain students is disrupting and denying the school choice for over 50,000 students experiencing closure of their public school. With the state projecting 98,000 existing public-school students will utilize ESAs to attend private schools, additional public-school closures are imminent, and ESAs will further deny choice for families choosing their public school.
8.) Voters Consistently Defeat School Choice: Despite claims the majority of Texans support school choice, voters have defeated school choice initiatives placed ono the ballot in every state. In 2024, voters in Colorado and the conservative states of Kentucky and Nebraska repealed or defeated school choice initiatives for private schools.
Peter Greene, now retired after 39 years as a teacher in Pennsylvania, is a prolific writer. He has his own blog Curmudgacation, and he writes a column for Forbes. I am one of his most fervent admirers. He is a font of wisdom and common sense. In this post, he examines the cruelty of certain Arkansas elected officials who hate trans people. Greene notes the contradiction by those who claim they support “parental rights,” but not the rights of parents who support their children’s wish to be a different gender.
The bill authorizes lawsuits, and the language around the actual suing and collecting money part is long and complex– complex enough to suspect that Bentley, whose work experience is running tableware manufacturer Bentley Plastics, might have had some help “writing” the bill. The part where it lists the forbidden activities is short, but raises the eyebrows.
The bill holds anyone who “knowingly causes or contributes to the social transitioning of a minor or the castration, sterilization, or mutilation of a minor” liable to the minor or their parents. The surgical part is no shocker– I’m not sure you could find many doctors who would perform that surgery without parental consent, and certainly not in Arkansas (see 2023 law). But social transitioning? How does the bill define that?
“Social transitioning” means any act by which a minor adopts or espouses a gender identity that differs from the minor’s biological sex as determined by the sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles of the minor, including without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.
So a girl who wears “boy” jeans? A boy who wears his hair long? Is there an article of clothing that is so “male” that it’s notably unusual to see a girl wearing it? I suppose that matters less because trans panic is more heavily weighted against male-to-female transition. But boy would I love to see a school’s rules on what hair styles qualify as male or female….
The person filing the suit against a teacher who used the wrong pronoun or congratulated the student on their haircut could be liable for $10 million or more, and they’ve got 20 years to file a suit.
I’m never going to pretend that these issues are simple or easy, that it’s not tricky for a school to look out for the interests and rights of both parents and students when those parents and students are in conflict. But I would suggest remembering two things– trans persons are human beings and they are not disappearing. They have always existed, they will always exist, and, to repeat, they are actual human persons.
I was in school with trans persons in the early seventies. I have had trans students in my classroom. They are human beings, deserving of the same decency and humanity as any other human. I know there are folks among us who insist on arguing from the premise that some people aren’t really people and decency and humanity are not for everyone (and empathy is a weakness). I don’t get why some people on the right, particularly many who call themselves Christians, are so desperately frightened/angry about trans persons, but I do know that no human problems are solved by treating some human beings as less-than-human. And when your fear leads to policing children’s haircuts to fit your meager, narrow, brittle, fragile view of how humans should be, you are a menace to everyone around you. You have lost the plot. Arkansas, be better.
President Trump and Vice President Vance berate President Zelensky at the White House, February 28, 2025 (OSV News photo/Brian Snyder, Reuters)
John Connelly is a historian of East Central Europe at the University of California at Berkeley. This essay appeared in Conmonweal. I urge you to subscribe. How I wish someone would read this essay out loud to Donald Trump. Among other things, it demonstrates the importance of learning history and the dangers of historical ignorance.
Connelly writes:
For decades pundits have been urging us to do something about this or that dictator because he was “Hitler.” A quarter century ago, David Brooks was equating Saddam Hussein with the Nazi leader, and a quarter century before that, newspapers portrayed Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as their day’s equivalent of the Führer. The historical episode these writers had in mind was the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Chamberlain and Daladier surrendered Czechoslovakia’s fortified border areas in return for “peace.” Half a year later, Hitler helped himself to the rest of that undefended country, until then the last surviving democracy east of the Rhine. The lesson was that we must not appease dictators: it only encourages them.
In 2022, history finally produced an actual parallel to the attack on Czechoslovakia when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a functioning East European democracy. Yet, in contrast to 1938, this time the democracy fought back, and the West stood in united support—that is, until the pusillanimous and unprincipled acts of the Trump administration. The U.S. president has already gone far beyond anything Chamberlain might have dreamed of. Trump has not only appeased a dictator but adopted the dictator’s own language and reasoning, and he seems willing to award Putin vast Ukrainian territories before peace negotiations have even begun. As if all this weren’t strange enough, he also sent Vice President J. D. Vance to a conference in Munich to berate our allies for their allegedly undemocratic behavior. He then met with the leader of a party that has downplayed the importance of Hitler to German and world history and who opposes support of Ukraine.
The explosive exchange between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office prompted commentators to look for other historical parallels. Bartosz T. Wieliński, who writes for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, recalled that the evening before Hitler sent his armies to seize Prague in March 1939, he summoned Czech president Emil Hácha to Berlin and threatened to lay waste to the Czech capital if Hácha did not accept “peace” on German terms. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring stood by nodding, nearly causing old Hácha to collapse. By contrast, writes Wieliński, president Zelensky has stood firm.
But an even more apt parallel occurred a few months later, in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin decided to divide Poland and treat themselves to the spoils, including the country’s grain and oil. Careful historians could list many differences between now and then, but the underlying intention to expropriate a small country’s resources has a familiar ring, as does the imperial attitude behind it. Stalin’s transactional mentality continued after World War II, when he insisted that Poles repay the USSR for having cleared their lands of German troops by awarding it Polish oil and coal.
The United States of that period, led by men committed to defending freedom, behaved very differently. With much of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army, it invested huge sums (most in outright aid) to get Western Europe back on its feet and to sustain its democratic governments. The investments served the interests of peace because democratic states seldom go to war with each other.
The current administration relegates such thinking to the past, with Trump likening international affairs to a card game, with some holding stronger “hands” than others. Yet card games at least have rules, while what imperial powers do is help themselves to new cards as they see fit and knock over the card table whenever fair play displeases them. The best-known advocate of such behavior is the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that different rules apply to great powers; he might be the only serious thinker who would justify Trump’s ambitions to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. Vice President Vance badgered Ukraine’s president to express more gratitude to the United States, even though he has done so profusely for years. What Vance seemed to expect was the sort of self-abasement that vassals once rendered to their lords. As long as humans can think and write freely, that fiasco will go down as a special disgrace for the United States, a low point in meanness and absence of compassion. It is we who should be grateful to Ukrainians—the same way we’re grateful to the men who landed in Normandy in June 1944 or to the soldiers of George Washington’s army. Like those heroes of yesteryear, today’s Ukrainians are putting their lives on the line for the sake of freedom.
That sort of argument may mystify the American right, but it also surprises some people on the left. I’ve heard colleagues in Berkeley denigrate the Ukrainian struggle as one driven by “nationalism” fueled by ancient ethnic chauvinism. In the midst of the Bosnian war, even the well-read and well-meaning Bill Clinton expressed frustration with such “Old World” nationalism, saying, “until those people over there get tired of killing one another, bad things will continue to happen.” Trump himself shows some of this impatience, portraying Zelensky as yet another Eastern European closed to reason.
But what’s happening in Ukraine is not difficult to understand. What we have been witnessing, in the years since 2014, is an East European democratic revolution much like our own, if not more dramatic. The colonists who took up arms in the 1770s were responding to everyday colonialism, of living under an empire that left them little voice in their own affairs and blithely exploited their lives and treasures. At some point, those Americans decided freedom was a cause worth dying for.
This was the sentiment an audience in Berkeley heard last September from Taras Dobko, the rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University. A missile had recently struck an apartment house in Lviv, wiping out a whole family, including Daria Bazylevych, a second-year cultural-studies major. For years, students and professors have been going off to fight and sometimes die, and now the hundreds of mourners at Daria’s funeral Mass recognized a consensus that has strengthened over time: human life is precious, but some things are more important than simple survival.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky.
The comparisons I have been invoking are approximate. The imperial aggressors Ukrainians face are endlessly more sinister than George III’s forces. But the similarities are nevertheless striking. Recall the early images from three years ago, just after Russian troops had crossed Ukraine’s borders. All kinds of people sought to repel the invaders—the young, the old, the tough, the nerdy, workers, students. The real issue was not territory on a map but how human beings on any territory are allowed to live their lives. These human beings were desperate not to fall under a regime of lawlessness, where human life is for sale and dignity is trampled by tyranny. Today’s Ukrainian patriotism is not about ethnicity. Many of the troops defending Ukraine are Russian-speaking; the religious communities represented among these troops range from Greek Catholic (Uniate) to atheist.
In the summer of 2022, President Zelensky, who is Jewish, demonstrated his acute historical vision by calling his country a “new nation.” Technically, the claim is wrong. Sources referred to a Ukrainian nation back in the seventeenth century. But the nation Zelensky means transcends that past. He is placing Ukraine in the small company of nations that define their identities by looking forward and not backward. The new Ukraine is a place and a people that seeks to create a future free from tyranny.
Here, Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few. There was 1789, when the French people walked onto the historical stage with the novel insistence that they had a right to self-rule. There was 1848, when peoples across Europe tried to follow the French example, but that movement soon came apart in ethnic bickering. And then there were the revolutions of 1989, when Europeans between France and Russia rose up against the Soviet empire. In world history, the closest parallel is indeed 1776, when North American colonists rebelled regardless of language and creed and dated their nation from the moment they determined to live freely.
But our day’s Americans can have short memories, a fact that frustrated Zelensky when he visited the Oval Office. For Trump and Vance, the indiscriminate torture and killing of hundreds of civilians committed by Putin’s soldiers just three years ago at Bucha are irrelevant to the challenges of “peace making.” Accusing Zelensky of “hating” Putin, as Trump did, is a bit like criticizing the Czechs or Poles for their animosity toward Hitler. Putin belongs to a small group of strongmen—including Pol Pot and Slobodan Milošević—who have presided over genocidal acts. Of course, sometimes one has to engage in diplomacy with such men, but the reports of U.S. diplomats becoming chummy over shared meals with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, evoke disgust. Neville Chamberlain at least had the decency to appear uncomfortable in the presence of cynical despots.
American ignorance of the past can extend beyond facts to a misunderstanding of what America is about. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is, deep down, a betrayal of the United States. Last summer, Vance said that his ancestors are buried in Kentucky, and he hoped that seven generations of his family would find their final resting places there as well: even if they “would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.” In fact, where our ancestors lie is irrelevant for our identities as Americans; their graves may be anywhere in the world. We are not a community of soil and blood.
But the sentiment Vance expressed is not unknown elsewhere. In 1984, I went on a field trip to eastern Poland with historians from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. My roommate on the trip, a young instructor, explained to me why Poles could not forget the territories that had once belonged to Poland yet now lay in Ukraine: “Remember, our graves are there.” Fortunately, when their country became free in 1989, the better angels in Polish society prevailed. As Timothy Snyder explained in The Reconstruction of Nations, émigré intellectuals determined that Poland needed peace and not more land. Eastern Europeans have suffered from territorial disputes for centuries, and that moment was a time to look forward and consign destructive bickering to history.
Hence the extraordinary incomprehension with which Poles and other Europeans view the Trump regime, which seems more intent on expanding America’s borders than on protecting existing ones in Europe. Washington now joins Moscow in calling Zelensky a “dictator.” That is why Europeans insist upon security guarantees for Ukrainians: as long as pernicious and demonstrably false ideas about Ukraine are taught as dogma to tens of millions of Russians, there can be no return to normal. An expansionist state backed by an aggressive ideology cannot be appeased; it can only be stopped.
Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few.
Today’s Ukrainian fighters live in trenches. They spend weeks in puddles of cold water, unable to rest properly, subsisting on terrible food. Like the men of D-Day or those who accompanied Washington to fight in wintry Princeton, they face not only death but discomforts that are difficult to imagine and usually forgotten in history books. Soldiers then and now have suffered these things so that their fellow citizens can say what they want in public, so that journalists can report without fear of retribution from civil authorities, so that teachers can speak freely in their classrooms without having to worry about being reported for indoctrinating their students with “Western ideology.” Growing threats to civil liberties under the Trump regime are of a piece with his admiration for Putin and with Vance’s meeting with neo-fascists in Munich. We are letting our freedoms slip away, and it’s not clear why.
Our founders, despite the checks and balances they built into the new republic, had gloomy forebodings. No matter how brilliantly conceived, they knew a constitution alone could not guarantee civic virtue. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin was right that the demos would one day succumb to corruption, but what would he say about voters who abandoned their God-given critical faculties and supported a man who, just four years earlier, had whipped up a mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? Video images show the attackers beating police with flagpoles.
For decades, I have been teaching students about interwar Germany’s last free elections in 1932, and when class is over we leave the lecture hall with pained incomprehension at those strange people back then. No longer. Germans of that time faced unemployment, destitution, street violence; they had suffered more in a war than we can imagine. Still, that July, far fewer than half of them voted for the radical right (37.2 percent). The numbers went down to 32 percent in November. His party in decline, Hitler was considering suicide when a coterie of conservatives schemed to bring him to power.
In November 2024, the United States was enjoying high employment, steady growth, and decreasing inflation, yet more than half of us voted for our own brand of right-wing populism. Yes, I am aware there are deep problems with housing, health care, and education, but that is no justification for casting a ballot that jeopardizes democracy. There was no reason to think that a second Trump administration would address those basic problems.
Is it not a kind of civic corruption for a nation to be blessed with abundant resources and fortuitous geography and not appreciate it? (Zelensky, ever the keen student of history, gently tried to remind Vance and Trump that Americans were protected by an ocean—a lesson that did not go over well.) Our conspicuously pious vice president might consider thanking the Almighty that we have peace-loving, democratic Canada on our northern border and not, like the Ukrainians, a rapacious, occasionally genocidal empire three times our size.
We are not in the 1930s. Our European allies have drawn lessons that make a return to Munich unlikely if not impossible. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Ukraine is not isolated, but an object of genuine neighborly concern. In Poland, France, and Austria, centrist forces have rallied to keep the far right out of power. The German elections suggest that when Elon Musk and J. D. Vance promote right-wing extremists abroad, it only drives Europe’s democrats closer together. Europeans display a wariness of neo-fascism that we, who have been spared direct experience of totalitarian rule, evidently lack.
Against the background of an Eastern Europe where nationhood has usually been about ethnicity, Ukraine’s brand of civic nationhood is a world-historical miracle. We don’t know what mysterious pool of ingredients permits democracies to arise and thrive, we know only that, unlike so many places where the United States has involved itself militarily, democracy has taken root in Ukraine. Unlike in 1938, when Czechs hoped that the West would sacrifice blood for their democracy, all that Ukrainians ask of other democracies is military aid, which in our case amounts to about four percent of the defense budget.
But even more important than our material support is their own faith: that some things, like freedom, are worth dying for, as Dobko reminded us in Berkeley. That belief can fade, and when it does, the effect can be contagious. In 1938, Czechs witnessed allies unwilling to stand for shared principles, and after World War II, Czechoslovakia—once the lone democracy east of the Rhine—became the sole European country to submit willingly to totalitarianism. Soviet troops left Czechoslovakian territory in December 1945, yet Czechs streamed into the Communist Party and the final seizure of power in 1948 was generated from below. It took democracy decades to recover.
Who would have thought an American president would make Neville Chamberlain look good? In 1938, the British PM sought peace to avert millions of deaths, while Trump seeks peace to advance “U.S. interests,” which he understands in purely material terms. Peace not for the sake of people, but of mineral rights. All talk of values like freedom or solidarity is anathema, and if “democracy” is invoked, it is only to aid its enemies. History writers of the future will pay close attention to what the United States does now. Far less is asked of us than was asked of the Western powers in 1938, and unless we change course, those historians will judge us far more severely than the men who once tried to appease Hitler.
John Connellyteaches the history of East Central Europe at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe(Princeton, 2020).
ICE has become the American Gestapo. They are snatching foreign students on American campuses and whisking them away, often to undisclosed locations, with no hearings, no due process.
The latest snatch-and-grab occurred yesterday at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
The Trump administration’s campaign against pro-Palestinian activists reached the Boston area Tuesday evening when an international PhD student at Tufts was arrested by masked federal immigration agents on a residential street and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana, according to federal immigration records and the student’s attorney.
Plainclothes officers handcuffed Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish nationalin the US on a student visa, and loaded her into an unmarked SUV with tinted windows as she pleaded for explanations, according to video of the arrest. She was transferred to Louisiana despite a federal judge ordering US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday night not to remove Ozturk from Massachusetts without prior notice.
The precise timing of Ozturk’s transfer to Louisiana and the issuance of the judge’s order was unclear.
It was also unclear why the government targeted Ozturk, who is doctoral candidate at Tufts department of child study and human development. She had voiced support for the pro-Palestinian movement at Tufts, but was not known as a prominent leader. Her lawyer said she is not aware of any charges against her.
“I don’t understand why it took the government nearly 24 hours to let me know her whereabouts,” her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said. ”Why she was transferred to Louisiana despite the court’s order is beyond me. Rumeysa should immediately be brought back to Massachusetts, released, and allowed to return to complete her PhD program.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security asserted Ozturk “engaged in support of Hamas,” a US-designated terror group behind the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that led to Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, but did not provide evidence of that claim.
“A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the spokesperson said.
A screen grab from a video shows Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, in white coat, being approached by federal immigration authorities before being detained on Tuesday, March 25 in Somerville.
Ozturk is the latest international student arrested by the Trump administration, which has vowed to deport non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists whom it accuses of engaging in antisemitic or illegal protests. That campaign is part of Trump’s wider crackdown on elite universities, including funding cuts, bans on diversity programs, and investigations over schools’ alleged inaction on antisemitism.
Earlier in March, Trump’s antisemitism task force canceled $400 million of federal funding for Columbia University. The administration also arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and Algerian citizen who was a leader of the school’s pro-Palestinian movement. Officials are trying to deport him, too, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared his continued presence in the United States was detrimental to US foreign policy.
Ozturk’s lawyer said information about her client was recently added to Canary Mission, a website that compiles information about pro-Palestinian students and professors, and which activists say has led to harassment and doxxing. The website noted Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper last year criticizing the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement,urging Tufts to “end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination.”
Pro-Palestinian activists and free speech advocates have decried the arrests as unconstitutional repression of political speech.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell called the footage of the arrest “disturbing.”
“Based on what we now know, it is alarming that the federal administration chose to ambush and detain her, apparently targeting a law-abiding individual because of her political views. This isn’t public safety. It’s intimidation that will, and should, be closely scrutinized in court,” Campbell said.
Ozturk’s arrest took place slightly after 5 p.m. Tuesday on Mason Street in Somerville near Tufts, according to a resident who witnessed the arrest and spoke with the Globe on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the government, as well as security camera footage obtained by the Globe.
While walking his dog, the witness said, he saw a woman screaming outside a house. Half a dozen officers in plainclothes and wearing masks surrounded her, he said. As they handcuffed her, she cried and said, “OK, OK, but I’m a student,” he recalled.
Then they placed her in an unmarked SUV with tinted windows….
Reyyan Bilge, an assistant teaching professor in psychology at Northeastern University, told the Globe she has known Ozturk for more than a decade since Bilge taught Ozturk at Şehir University in Istanbul. Ozturk came to the United States to get her master’s degree at Columbia as a Fulbright scholar, Bilge said.
She graduated in 2020 from the developmental psychology program at Columbia Teacher’s College, according to a 2021 social media post by the school.
Bilge described Ozturk as soft-spoken andkind. “If you were to actually have a chat with her for about five minutes, you would understand how kind and how decent a person she is,” she said….
Tufts University president Sunil Kumar disclosed the arrest in a campus-wide message Tuesday night.
The university “had no pre-knowledge” of the arrest, he said, and Tufts did not share information with authorities, adding that the location of the arrest was not affiliated with the university.
The university was told Ozturk’svisa status was “terminated,” Kumar said in the email.
“We realize that tonight’s news will be distressing to some members of our community, particularly the members of our international community,” he said.
In a three-page order issued Tuesday, federal Judge Indira Talwani ordered ICE to submit a written explanation for relocating Ozturk and notify the court 48 hours before any effort takes place to allow the judge time to review the added information.
Ozturk’s lawyer filed a habeas petition in court on Tuesday asking for her release. Talwani also directed ICE officials to respond to the petition by Friday.
All of Ozturk’s family is in Turkey, and she only has friends here in the United States, Bilge said.
Bilge said Ozturk would never say anything to hurt anyone. “She’s not antisemitic,” Bilge said. But like many other Muslims, Bilge said, Ozturk is concerned about the human rights of Palestinian people. “But that’s freedom of speech,” Bilge said. “That’s just being human.”
On Wednesday evening, more than 2,000 people rallied insupport ofOzturk at a park near Powder House Square and the Tufts campus. Among them were students from Tufts and Harvard, as well as residents from the surrounding neighborhoods. Some wore keffiyehs, a patterned scarf associated with Palestinian nationalism. Others wore yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcap. “Stand up, fight back!” they chanted.
The cruelty and sheer meanness of the Trump administration can never be overestimated. As the administration closes down USAID, without Congressional authorization, it announced a series of cuts that will kill millions of people. Having an ardent opponent of vaccines in charge of Heakth and Human Services removes any advocacy to distribute proven methods to save lives and prevent epidemics.
The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.
The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.
Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.
The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually.
The cover letter details the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. after the cuts, with most of its funding eliminated, and only 869 of more than 6,000 employees still on active duty.
In all, the administration has decided to continue 898 U.S.A.I.D. awards and to end 5,341, the letter says. It says the remaining programs are worth up to $78 billion. But only $8.3 billion of that is unobligated funds — money still available to disburse. Because that amount covers awards that run several years into the future, the figure suggests a massive reduction in the $40 billion that U.S.A.I.D. used to spend annually.
A spokesperson for the State Department, which now runs what is left of U.S.A.I.D., confirmed the terminations on the list were accurate and said that “each award terminated was reviewed individually for alignment with agency and administration priorities, and terminations were executed where Secretary Rubio determined the award was inconsistent with the national interest or agency policy priorities.”
The memo to Congress presents the plan for foreign assistance as a unilateral decision. However because spending on individual health programs such as H.I.V. or vaccination is congressionally allocated, it is not clear that the administration has legal power to end those programs. This issue is currently being litigated in multiple court challenges.
Among the programs terminated is funding for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which conducts surveillance for diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans, including bird flu, in 49 countries. Some major programs to track and fight malaria, one of the world’s top killers of children, have also been ended.
Dr. Austin Demby, the health minister of Sierra Leone, which relies on Gavi’s support to help purchase vaccines, said he was “shocked and perturbed” by the decision to terminate U.S. funding and warned that the ramifications would be felt worldwide.
“This is not just a bureaucratic decision, there are children’s lives at stake, global health security will be at stake,” he said. “Supporting Gavi in Sierra Leone is not just a Sierra Leone issue, it’s something the region, the world, benefits from.”
“The guiding principle of my work is ‘go there.’ I want to hear directly from the people who are affected by disease, or lack of access to a new drug. I’ve been writing about global health for 30 years and have reported from more than 80 countries.”
In addition to trying to reach all children with routine immunizations, Sierra Leone is currently battling an mpox outbreak, for which Gavi has provided both vaccines and critical support to deliver them, he said.
“We hope the U.S. government will continue to be the global leader it always been — putting money in Gavi is not an expenditure, it’s an investment,” Dr. Demby said
Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago. The United States contributes 13 percent of its budget.
The terminated grant to Gavi was worth $2.6 billion through 2030. Gavi was counting on a pledge made last year by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for its next funding cycle.
The loss of U.S. funds will set back the organization’s ability to continue to provide its basic range of services — such as immunization for measles and polio — to a growing population of children in the poorest countries, let alone expand to include new vaccines.
By Gavi’s own estimate, the loss of U.S. support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result.
Elon Musk’s team of vandals, known as DOGE, have raided government agencies in search of deep cuts that they can take credit for. Most of their claims of savings turn out to be false or inflated but they persist in canceling contracts and firing government employees. The effects are now being felt at the Social Security Administration.
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. But the agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing. And ringing. The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday during a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s pick to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants and legal immigrants who need Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.
“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview. “I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
King’s home state has the country’s oldest population. “What they’re doing now is unconscionable,” he said.
Leland Dudek — the accidental leader elevated to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs — has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust.
The moves have upended an agency that, despite the popularity of its programs, has been underfunded for years, faces potential insolvency in a decade and has been led by four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed. The latest controversy came last week, when Dudek threatened to shut down operations in response to a federal judge’s ruling that Dudek claimed would leave no one with access to beneficiaries’ personal information to serve them.
Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions from angry constituents in their districts. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. The AARP announced on Monday that more than 2,000 retirees per week have called the organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans…
With aging technology systems and a $15 billion budget that has stayed relatively flat over a decade, Social Security was already struggling to serve the public amid an explosion of retiring baby boomers. The staff that reviews claims for two disability programs was on life support following massive pandemic turnover — and still takes 233 days on average to review an initial claim.
But current and former officials, advocates and others who interact with the agency — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — said Social Security has been damaged even further by the rapid cuts and chaos of Trump’s first two months in office. Many current and former officials fear it’s part of a long-sought effort by conservatives to privatize all or part of the agency….
Musk’s DOGE team began poring through Social Security’s massive trove of private data on millions of Americans, working in a fourth-floor conference room at the Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters, with blackout curtains on the windows and an armed security guard posted outside.
Their obsession with false claims that millions of deceased people were fraudulently receiving benefits consumed the DOGE team at first. Then came new mandates designed to address alleged fraud: Direct deposit transactions and identity authentication that affect almost everyone receiving benefits will no longer be able to be done by phone. Customers with computers will be directed to go through the process online — and those without access to one to wait in line at their local field office. A change announced internally last week will require legal immigrants with authorization to work in the United States and newly naturalized citizens to apply for or update their Social Security cards in person, eliminating a long-standing practice that sent the cards automatically through the mail.
The article goes on much longer to describe the confusion and chaos among elderly people seeking information. Wait times for telephone calls, which used to be answered to 10-15 minutes, may take two hours, three hours or longer.
